Basic tasks in Microsoft OneNote 2013

OneNote is a digital notebook that provides a single place for all of your notes and information—everything you need to remember and manage in your life at home, at work, or at school.

In OneNote, your notebooks never run out of paper. They’re easy to reorganize, print, and share, and they have a fast search feature so you can recall anything instantly. Best of all, you can store your notebooks online and use them from anywhere.

Here are some of the basic steps to help get you started with OneNote.

Create a new notebook

When you first start OneNote, it creates a sample notebook for you. You can use this notebook or quickly create your own.

Click File > New.

Select one of the available locations (for example, OneDrive), or click Add a Place to tell OneNote where you want to store the new notebook.

Follow the screen prompts you see. When your new notebook is ready, it will open to new section that has a single blank page in it.

Tip: New pages are typically blank. If you prefer a more decorative design, you can apply a template to a new page by clicking Insert > Page Templates > Page Templates.

Add links

Whenever you type text that OneNote recognizes as a link (also known as a hyperlink), OneNote automatically formats it as one. For example, if you type www.microsoft.com into your notes, OneNote turns that into a link. Clicking it will open the Microsoft website in your browser.

You can also manually insert links into your notes (including links to text, pictures, and to other pages and sections of your notebooks), by doing the following:

Select the text or picture you want to link.

Click Insert > Link.

In the Link dialog box, type the link’s destination URL into the Address field and then click OK.

Save your notes

OneNote doesn’t have a Save button. That’s because you never have to save your work in OneNote like you do in other programs.

As you work in your notebooks, OneNote automatically saves everything for you—no matter how small or large the changes you’ve made. This frees your mind to let you think about your projects, thoughts, and ideas instead of thinking about your computer files.